The disclosure relates to financial accounting software, and in particular, to a software program including an extension ledger feature.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Today, business entities utilize software systems to manage accounting information. One component of such financial software systems is the ledger, which describes self-contained storage of financial data. An individual ledger typically has a special purpose, and provides a specific view on financial data.
Conventionally, such financial software may rely upon separate ledgers in order to fulfill particular requirements. One common example is where the financial data is to be processed according to different accounting principles (e.g. handling of multi-GAAP scenarios).
However, the effort of creating an entirely new ledger for the specific task (e.g., for each different accounting principle regime) may be time-consuming and costly. For example, the same generic data may be handled according to a number of different accounting principles applicable to particular global jurisdictions.
Moreover, in nearly all cases such special-purpose individual ledgers store redundant data. This undesirably increases the memory footprint, and leads to the need to reconcile data between the special-purposes ledgers. Both prospects again increase the cost of using the software.